Fear & Loathing in the Star Wars Ticket Line

My dad and I were cruising up I-65 this past weekend, on our way to enter our droptop ‘Vette in a local car show, and since I was the one in the driver’s seat I got to pick the tunes. Pop’s a mountain man, mind you, raised on the outskirts of the Cumberland Plateau, so to his ears any music that could even vaguely be described as pop or rock is positively pornographic. And not in a good way. So, to play it safe I queued up the score for The Empire Strikes Back.

“Hey, that’s Star Wars, aint’ it?” he asked, delighted with himself for actually recognizing a piece of music in my library. “You gonna camp out overnight for tickets for that new one?”

There was a mocking twinkle in his eye when he asked that. To this day, he still ribs me for being the first person in line for tickets to see Episode I, the first person in all of Montgomery to procure tickets after 18 hours of standing/sitting/
sleeping in that line, and for making the front page of our local newspaper as a result.

That’s just not how it works anymore, I explained. The Internet, I told him, has pretty much killed the whole camping-out-overnight-for-tickets experience.

Here’s the thing, though: After suffering through the unpredictability and panic of procuring tickets for The Last Jedi this week, I miss those good old days of sleeping on concrete overnight in oppressive Alabama air. This year, as with The Force Awakens two years ago, Disney decided in its infinite wisdom to tie the onset of ticket sales to the release of the trailer for the film. And some knucklehead in marketing learned zero lessons from 2015 and decided to again tie the unveiling of the trailer to the halftime show for Monday Night Football.

Innumerable Reddit threads were created in an effort to foretell exactly what time that might actually equate to in the real world. Theater chains across the nation were flooded with calls from panicky nerds like myself begging for a more precise window. “After the trailer airs,” is all we were told. But we were told the same tale two years ago, and tickets actually went on sale hours earlier with no notice, famously breaking the Internet.

So, the missus and I, in an effort to avoid a similar technological meltdown, drove to our local AMC just before the start of the game and formed what quickly became a line. The ticket agent was clueless as to why. “That movie doesn’t come out until December!” We implored her to call her manager. “He says he thinks they might go on sale tomorrow.” We insisted they should be on sale any time now. “It’s not even in the computer!”

Around that time, a hooded nerd near the back of the line announced that tickets were on sale at the other big cineplex in town, two hours earlier than promised, but their website had just crashed. Half the line fled immediately for their cars. The crowd that remained teetered on the edge of rioting, because if there’s one thing we nerds just don’t know how to deal with, it’s unpredictability.

Thankfully, just before things turned really ugly, the woefully uninformed ticket agent announced that, hey, whatdoyaknow?—tickets for the first IMAX showing just popped up in her computer. $25 apiece. Some special fan event or something. Do we want to buy those? And almost instantly, that semi-chaotic line of nerds turned into a mosh pit.

I understand the position Disney is in. They’re in possession of one of the few movie franchises guaranteed to turn a profit at the box office, in a market that’s definitely trending toward Slumpsville. They want to drum up excitement. They want the Internet to be abuzz.

There’s a fine line, though, between excitement and anxiety, and for the second time in two years, Disney has managed to drum up consternation and angst in the lead-up to pre-sales of pretty much the only movie event temping enough to get my butt into a cinema seat. And, hey, I’m sure it worked to their financial advantage again this time, especially given that they duped so many hopped-up Star Wars fans into paying double-price to see the first showing. But how long can this bubble possibly last?

Speaking as the biggest Star Wars fan in the known universe (and yes, I have the prize from besting the president of the Star Wars fan club in a trivia contest to prove it), I’d say not much longer. Because if the chaos and uncertainty of buying tickets this time around has even me considering sitting out opening night when Episode IX rolls around in a couple of years—or, shudder the thought, waiting for the home-video release—then big cinematic tentpole events like this are surely doomed. At least when they’re as poorly planned and misleadingly marketed as this one.

—Dennis Burger

Dennis Burgeris an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiastwho somehow also manages to find time for technological passions includinghigh-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit ofAlabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-poundAmerican Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.